Monday, April 6, 2009

Frankenfood Up-Date: HR 875 Is World-Wide GMO Authorization Masquerading As "Food Safety" Bill

And it spells disaster for bio-diversity. As I have mentioned before.

It seems that the "new" regime is poised to take the biggest gamble of its and our life-times, opening the door for the "regulation" of plant-stocks by seed producers. This means GMO crops and prohibitions against storing seed, and criminal as well as civil penalties agains farmers, world-wide, who do not pacifically acquiesce to this monstrously stupid, incredibly greedy, monumentally destructive, obscenely short-sighted idea--which, amazingly, is being sold (spun? propagandized?) by the CorpoRats as noble, humane "altruism": feeding the hungry around the world. And ALL for the benefit of Obama's corpoRat masters at ADM, Cargill, and Monsanto.

The following was in my in-box last week, and I almost missed it:
HR 875 Is Not About Food Safety, It's About Genocide of Agricultural Biodiversity
One of the most potentially dangerous bills we've ever heard of is trying to sneak its way through Congress right now, in the sheep's clothing of so-called "modernization" of food safety. HR 875 (text of bill) is a bill put up by Monsanto and other monolithic corporations trying to seize totalitarian control over all agriculture.

It was introduced by Rosa DeLauro, whose husband WORKS for Monsanto, and is ultimately about one thing, defining ONLY their own GMO products as "safe". What makes the bill so dangerous is that it is heavy on penalties including prison time, while at the same time being incredibly vague about what would actually trigger those sanctions. HR 875 is nothing but a Trojan horse, with an invading army to be designated later, in the form of an bureaucratic administrator (most likely a corporate lobbyist shill) with draconian LAW MAKING POWER to make up their own definitions so that all competitors are either driven into bankruptcy or locked up.

There are problems with food safety we can talk about, but HR 875 is not going to make us safer, any more than invading Iraq made us safer. It MUST be stopped.

So in the midst of this attempted Panzer action by Monsanto, are we hearing about any of this in our propaganda based mainstream media? No, they distract our attention talking about Michelle Obama's adorable organic garden at the White House, as if she is making agricultural policy.

But will that little White House garden end up as something like a diorama, a quaint reenactment of what farming used too be like when it was healthy, they way they would reenact Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag? Will they lull us into complacency while down the street Congress at the same time paves the way for breaking the back of every small farmer in the country, turning our entire agricultural system into a chemically overtreated, Genetically Mutated Organism (GMO) nightmare?
Michelle Obama's "organic" WhiteHouse garden has already been criticized by the ag Chemical/pest killer industry for NOT using poisons, as if she were somehow to be blamed for wanting her children's produce not to be fouled with noxious toxins.

Notably
...conventional farming advocates were unconcerned about First Lady Laura Bush's insistence that White House chefs cook with organic food. Former executive chef Walter Scheib wrote that Mrs. Bush was "adamant that in ALL CASES if an organic product was available it was to be used in place of a non-organic product." It's fine for the Bushes to be closet organic eaters, but very different for the Obamas to promote growing food without pesticides or herbicides. I think Americans will be surprised by how much one organic garden can produce.

1 comment:

desmoinesdem said...

Thanks for the link! I am really excited about the White House organic garden.

I wanted to note that Jill Richardson of the La Vida Locavore blog has been asking around and doesn't share that alarmist view of HR 875. See here:

http://www.lavidalocavore.org/showDiary.do?diaryId=1329